The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

1 SMUGGLERS’ PREY

EVERY DAY, scores of young women throughout the former East Bloc are lured by job offers that lead to a hellish journey of sexual slavery and violence. Despite the barrage of warnings on radio and TV, in newspapers and on billboards, desperate women continue to line up with their naiveté and applications in hand, hoping that, this time, they might just be in luck. Newspaper ads in Kyiv, Bucharest, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Minsk and Prague offer destitute women a path out of grinding poverty—a chance at a new start—with no qualifications required. These ads promise a world of relative comfort, especially when compared with conditions at home. Positions

are offered around the world as waitresses, models, nannies, dishwashers and maids. The monthly salaries reach $2500, which, for the vast majority, is more than they would ever make in years. Some ads even appear to be officially sanctioned, bearing logos of the American Stars and Stripes or the Canadian Maple Leaf. Others are decked out in the enticing tricolors of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy or France.

Bogus recruiters offer prospective job seekers a “complete package” for positions abroad. Typically, they don’t require prior work experience, and they almost always seek young, preferably single, women. “Girls: Must be single and very pretty. Young and tall. We invite you for work as models, secretaries, dancers, choreographers, gymnasts. Housing is supplied. Foreign posts available. Must apply in person,” an ad in a Kyiv newspaper read. The arrangements often include training, travel documents and airfare, at no cost to the applicants. All they need to do is show up! What these fresh recruits don’t know is that in virtually 95 percent of these cases, the jobs being promised do not exist.

Many of the ads are placed by seemingly legitimate employment agencies that have hung out shingles in Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic and Ukraine. Some agencies have gone so far as to set up “career day” booths at universities in Russia, promising profitable work abroad. Most of these firms, or intermediaries, are nothing more than hunting grounds for criminal networks involved in the lucrative industry of sex. For more than a decade, unscrupulous recruiters have snared upward of 175,000 women a year from the former Soviet republics and delivered them as sacrificial lambs to traffickers, pimps and brothel owners in foreign lands.

Women are sometimes recruited in groups, and thinking there is safety in numbers, they enthusiastically sign on. One group of women from Lviv, Ukraine, was offered jobs as housekeepers in the Czech Republic. Once they crossed into the Republic they were sold to a pimp for $500 each and forced into prostitution along the infamous Highway E-55 near the Czech–German border. In another case, an entire dance troupe of young Ukrainian women was conned by an “impresario” promising a five-city European tour. The tour seemed legitimate. They had even been presented with “contracts.” They ended up locked in a German apartment and sold into the trade.

In the world of sex trafficking, not all women fall victim to the spin of phony employment agencies and bogus job ads. The first link in the trafficking chain is more often a relative, a neighbor or a friend of a friend. An acquaintance, adept at gaining trust, will approach a young woman’s family with an offer to help her land a good job abroad. Every year, tremendous numbers of girls are sucked in by the ruse.

La Strada, a nongovernmental organization in Kyiv that assists trafficked women from Ukraine, has documented numerous cases of deception by acquaintances and individuals in trusted positions in the community. The culprits have included teachers, a local psychologist, the wife of a policeman and the daughter of a village priest.

Tanya, who comes from a small town in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, was one victim of this kind of deception.

Abandoned by her father at the age of four, she set out when she was twenty to find work to help her mother care for an invalid brother. Though she had completed technical school, there was no work to be found since most of the plants and factories in the town had shut down. The situation was desperate. There were times when her family survived on bread and water alone. According to La Strada, Tanya, who was described as “slim and pretty,” was offered an incredible opportunity when a friend of her mother’s proposed a job abroad in 1998. The woman told Tanya that wealthy Arab families in the United Arab Emirates were hiring maids. These jobs were allegedly paying up to $4000 a month. Tanya couldn’t believe her luck.

But when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a nearby police station and recounted her tale. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing had happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

In another case documented by La Strada, a twenty-three-year-old university graduate named Olexandra was lured from Chernihiv in northern Ukraine. Olexandra was a divorced mother of a two-year-old daughter and in dire financial straits. She was offered a well-paying job in Germany by a distant rela- tive, who boasted that her own daughter had worked there and had been very happy. And so in the summer of 1997 Olexandra and another young Ukrainian woman crossed into Poland to seek out the work. They were forcibly held in a building where they were beaten and raped. A few weeks later they were smuggled across a river into Germany, where Turkish pimps sold them several times. Along with Polish, Bulgarian and Czech women, Olexandra was forced to service clients in various German brothels. Later that fall the women were arrested in a police raid. Olexandra, now extremely ill, was deported to Ukraine, where she was diagnosed with a severe internal infection, hospitalized for three months and subjected to a number of invasive surgeries. The infection had been caused by her sex servitude abroad. Olexandra’s health, tragically, has not returned.

Even more disturbing is the use of trafficked women to lure new victims—the so-called second wave. For many trafficked women, it’s the only way of escaping the brutality of being forced to have unwanted sex with a dozen men a day. Their pimps give them the option of returning home if they promise to reel in a number of replacements. And the women are extremely convincing, often pulling up in luxury cars, wearing flashy jewelry and expensive clothes. In no time they’re surrounded by envious, naive teenage girls who readily fall for the grandiloquent tales of life in the golden West.

Another trap is the “matchmaking service” operating under the guise of an international introduction firm. These agencies, specializing in “mail-order brides” and often accessible to anyone with a computer, are usually nothing more than online brothels. According to the International Organization for Migration headquartered in Geneva, the vast majority of mail-order-bride agencies in the former Soviet Union are owned and run by organized crime. With countless victims clinging to the fairy-tale hope of a blossoming romance and a better life in the West, the pickings are enormous and ridiculously easy. Women are literally lining up in droves. But when they finally venture out of the country to meet Mr. Right they’re delivered into the clutches of ruthless pimps, forced directly into prostitution by their new “husbands” or sold outright for sex.

Other victims have been lured across borders by new “boyfriends,” tempted by promises of a night on the town. They too find themselves forced into waiting vehicles, sold to pimps or traffickers for a wad of cash.

Perhaps one of the most terrifying recruitment tactics is outright abduction. The girls are simply taken. In many rural areas in Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria, women and girls have been kidnapped walking home along country roads. The situation is so serious that in some rural areas, parents have stopped sending their daughters to school to protect them from being stolen.

No doubt one of the most appalling aspects of the trade is the targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe. In March 2003, for example, the U.S. State Department reported a “pattern of trafficking” involving orphans in Moldova. According to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the girls at risk are those who “must leave orphanages when they graduate,” usually at sixteen or seventeen. Most have no source of funds for living expenses or any education or training to get a job. Traffickers often know precisely when these girls are to be turned out of the institutions (“some orphanage directors sold information… to traffickers”) and are waiting for them, job offers in hand. The State Department also notes that throughout Russia, there are “reports of children being kidnapped or purchased from… orphanages for sexual abuse and child pornography” and that child prostitution is “widespread” in orphanages in Ukraine. And in Romania, “many orphanages are complicit in letting girls fall victim to trafficking networks.”

Vast armies of Russian children who have run away from brutal orphanages wander the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They are called Bezprizornye. Their ranks are swelled by the Beznadzornye, street kids who have been abandoned by their parents. These hapless children are the tragic byproducts of the new Russia. According to official estimates there are no fewer than one million; many social workers say the numbers could easily be double that.

The problem, moreover, is permeating all the former Soviet republics. Throughout the Newly Independent States, children are being discarded at an alarming rate by parents and families that can no longer afford to keep them. According to police data in Ukraine, 12,000 children are abandoned by their parents every year. A Ministry of Internal Affairs document states that 100,000 children—14 percent under the age of seven—were registered as homeless in 2000. Half of these children wound up in orphanages. The number of orphans in nearby Romania, meanwhile, exceeds 60,000.

For the most part, these orphanages are nothing more than cold storage facilities. A 1998 Human Rights Watch investigation found that children in Russian orphanages “are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They may be beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, or sexually abused, and are often subjected to degrading treatment by staff.” It’s not surprising that thousands of children run away each year, taking their chances by living on the streets.

Orphanages in Ukraine, Romania and Russia are bursting at the seams and, with most having lost their state funding, they’re unable to support the crush of orphans they receive. It is a daily struggle to make ends meet. The very principles on which these institutions operate are grossly unsatisfactory and provide little real benefit to a child’s chances of leading a normal life after release. It’s hard enough attending to the children’s basic needs, let alone preparing them for independence once they reach the age of eighteen. Few have training for the drastic changes that life on their own will bring. Most don’t even know how to boil a pot of water. This lack of basic life skills makes these children—especially the girls—easy prey for exploiters lurking near the gates. Sometimes they’re targeted even before they reach the gate—identified and sold by orphanage workers. Directors of several orphanages in Russia, Ukraine, Romania and the Czech Republic admit their girls are being preyed upon by sex traffickers but lament that they simply don’t have the resources to deal with the situation.

In the fall of 1999 two recruiters culled girls from a number of orphanages in the Republic of Karelia in north- western Russia near the Finnish border. The recruiters, looking professional and persuasive, arrived with offers of job training for girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. The beleaguered staff was overjoyed that these benevolent souls were taking an interest in the welfare of their girls. They knew full well the harsh reality the girls faced once they were turned out from the institution on their eighteenth birthday, and now at least a handful were being offered a fighting chance of making it on the outside. Following formal interviews, several hopefuls were selected for training in the art of Chinese cooking at a school in China. Their travel and instruction were to be free, with the proviso that they intern for two years as waitresses after their training.

About thirty girls anxiously signed up—all, not surprisingly, pretty, eager and naive. A week later, with their meager possessions, they boarded a bus. The excitement was palpable. And that was it. Instead of heading east to China, the bus barreled south, deep into Western Europe. The destination was a town in Germany, where they were taken to an apartment, locked up and deprived of food and water. The girls’ dreams quickly degenerated into a grueling nightmare. They were yelled at constantly. Sometimes they were beaten. A few days later they were herded into the living room and ordered to disrobe before a group of men with bodyguards in tow. The thugs ogled the girls and began bidding, buying the orphans outright in lots of three, four and five. The girls were then distributed to various German brothels, where they were forced to have sex with up to ten men a day. Over a period of six months, a few managed to escape. Others were scooped up in police raids. Only then did the story of this horrific deception make its way back to the orphanages.

It’s important to note that in the sordid underbelly of the international flesh trade, not every woman is an innocent dupe. In fact, police and government officials often go to great lengths to stress that some of these women willingly enter the trade. In their eyes, perhaps, this so-called willingness justifies their apathy and indifference. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Even the “willing” women have no idea of what really awaits. It’s true that many women know full well when they accept a job offer that they’ll be working in some aspect of the sex industry—massage parlors, strip clubs, peep shows and escort agencies. Depending on who’s assessing the situation— police, social workers, bureaucrats or women’s rights groups— the estimates of how many sign on “knowingly” range from 30 to 80 percent. Yet the vast majority of these women aren’t aware of the exact nature or conditions of the work. Those who agree to work abroad as prostitutes and escorts are led to believe they will do so under specific conditions. They’re told they will earn $5000 a month, live in a luxury apartment, have two days off a week, service two or three clients a night and never have to go with a man they don’t like. The “contract” is often for a mere three months, at which point the women are told that they will be free to leave.

Many of these women venture out with visions of the film Pretty Woman dancing in their heads. They expect to rake in lots of fast money and in the process perhaps even meet Mr. Right.

But those fantasies are shattered when, within moments of arriving at their destinations, they learn their true fate. Most end up in situations of incredible debt bondage, unable to earn enough to pay back the high interest on their travel and living expenses. They become victims of the worst possible forms of sexual exploitation. They are not free to leave, nor can they easily escape. They are sold to pimps or brothel owners on the open market, and soon find themselves trapped in abusive situations in which they are forced to have sex with as many as ten, twenty or thirty clients a day. They cannot refuse a customer or a demand. They are not allowed sick days. They do not get time off for their period. Some end up pregnant and having abortions. Many acquire HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the psychological and medical problems that come from constant abuse and gang rape. Some become alcoholics. Others become drug addicts. Often their pimps addict them to heroin to ensure they comply with all their demands.

All in all, no matter how “willing” they were and regardless of how they fell into the trafficking trap, the vast majority of these women end up as nothing more than slaves—abused, used and traded. And when they’re no longer useful or when they’ve gotten too old or too sick and riddled with disease, they are simply discarded. Only then can they contemplate returning home. Countless others never do go home. Many die from the abuse and the diseases. Others give up and kill themselves.

ONCE THESE WOMEN ARE RECRUITED—or captured or stolen—a well-oiled trafficking system kicks into gear. Criminal organizations use a variety of mechanisms to transport their human cargo across international borders. Many do so via channels that seem completely legal, thanks to student, tourist or temporary work visas. In some countries, women can get visas to work as exotic dancers or artists. Others enter as “mail-order brides.” They then overstay their visas and slip into the netherworld of illegal migrants.

When these seemingly legal avenues aren’t available, however, the traffickers turn to professional smugglers. Organized crime groups have established a massive and intricate network of routes through which they move women to different countries by land, water and air. These smuggling routes literally crisscross the globe and are controlled virtually every step of the way by interconnected criminal networks. In fact, most of the routes were carved out long ago by traffickers to smuggle illegal weapons or drugs. The recent explosive demand for Eastern and Central European women has simply attracted another black-market commodity to these well-trodden paths.

Professional traffickers, used to circumventing border crossings, engage border authorities in a never-ending game of cat and mouse. They constantly vary their routes to keep one step ahead of the law, moving the women across borders with relative ease. Along the serpentine border of the European Union, smugglers have established a complex system of well-protected corridors by exploiting “green borders” or unguarded frontiers. One of the more significant overland corridors is known as “the Eastern Route” and winds through Poland and into Germany. Once the traffickers and their victims are inside the European Union, all member nations are fair game and movement for organized crime becomes relatively unfettered. The women smuggled through this route come from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and are found in disturbing numbers in Italy, Greece, Germany, Belgium, Austria and France.

The most notorious corridor is the Balkan route. It weaves its way through Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo. During the bloody civil war that ripped the former Yugoslavia apart, criminal organizations established a strong foothold in the region. Their illicit contraband involved weapons and drugs. With the fighting now over, the Balkan route is used to smuggle illegal drugs, cars and women. This clandestine route traverses the Balkan territory, the key destination being the European Union. Italy is a prime target, providing easy access to many of the other countries in Europe. The Balkans, however, aren’t just transit points, thanks to the massive influx of United Nations peace-keepers and international humanitarian aid workers. Shockingly, their presence has provided a valuable, readymade market for local brothel keepers trading in trafficked women.

In Moldova, the path to sexual servitude often starts in a tiny, impoverished village, moving swiftly through Romania and into Hungary or Montenegro. Then it’s on to processing centers in Serbia. Women from Ukraine, on the other hand, are usually taken to Belgrade through Hungary and then distributed to Bosnia or Italy. Romanians cross into Serbia at the Iron Gates on the Danube River, while Bulgarian women are usually smuggled directly into the country. The route from Serbia to Italy is either overland—through Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia—or through the Albanian seaport towns of Vlorë and Durres, where women cling to high-speed rubber dinghies charging across the Adriatic Ocean to the Italian coast.

Another key corridor leads from the southern Bulgarian “golden triangle” of Blagoevgrad, Sandanski and Petric to Greece. Young women from Russia, Romania, Georgia and Ukraine are moved by trafficking rings into a number of hotels in these Bulgarian towns. They’re met by Greek gangsters who arrive in a regular stream to choose and place their orders, and even to test them out first-hand. The women are then entrusted to local smugglers, adept at navigating the treacherous mountain routes on the Greek–Bulgarian border, and are delivered to their new owners. Other trafficked women are destined for Turkey, yet another bustling market for Eastern European women, especially Ukrainians. To get to Turkey, traffickers travel overland through Georgia and Bulgaria and on boats from the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa en route to Istanbul and Ankara. Traffickers have also carved out smuggling routes through the Baltic States into the Scandinavian countries.

The geography and circumstance of trafficking women, however, is fluid and ever changing. At the beginning of the 1990s the prime sending countries were Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. A decade later these remain important countries of origin but have also become major destination points. Most of the women trafficked into the Czech Republic and Poland come from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova,

Romania, Georgia and Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia—Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan—are now emerging recruitment zones. One-third of the traffic from these regions moves through Central Europe and then onward to other European countries, while the remainder heads to the Middle East and China. In these directions, too, there is no shortage of routes.

Organized crime syndicates have also plotted lucrative and complex routes to far-flung destinations to capitalize on their “goods.” Israel, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Thailand, China and Japan are all key to their prostitution rackets. Canada and the United States are becoming increasingly significant destinations for trafficked women from Eastern Europe, as evidenced by the scores of ads in the back pages of cheesy tabloids in numerous North American cities. “Full-service nude massages by Russian beauties” are offered at $60 an hour—touching is permitted and customers are guaranteed “a release.” The ads also show a huge increase in Russian escort services in New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto, and in each of these cities, Russian dancers have become a popular staple in strip clubs and peep shows. The procurers make no distinction between Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian or Lithuanian women. They simply lump them together into one ethnic mold—Russian.

In order to keep one step ahead of the law and the pressure from international authorities to tighten border entry points, organized crime is moving increasingly into internal markets. Many women are being trafficked into the very cities from which the traffickers recruit. Major East European cities such as Bucharest, Prague, Odessa, Kyiv, St. Petersburg and Moscow are offering the burgeoning sex tourism market from North America, Europe and Asia a steady supply of East European women. Women are also being transported to Czech, Polish and Hungarian towns and roadways near the border with Germany and Austria to cash in on the regular cross-border traffic. The most notorious roadway is Highway E-55.

Renowned worldwide, Highway E-55 lies alongside the main thoroughfare between Dresden and Prague just a few kilometers from the Czech–German border. To motorists, this miserable five-kilometer stretch of asphalt boasts one of the highest concentrations of prostitutes in Europe. For those driven by lust, it has been dubbed the “highway of love,” its main customers German and Austrian men driving in for the great “deals.” They come for the cut-rate prices—half of what they pay in their homelands. A half-hour off E-55 or in nearby Dubi costs about $35. For sex without a condom, it’s an extra $10. But it’s not just the Europeans who come here. With the highway’s notoriety plastered on countless websites, sex tourists from as far away as Australia and North America are jetting to Germany, renting cars and cruising in. Every parking spot and meter of roadside is divvied up and controlled by pimps; every shaded lair in the nearby woods serves as an open-air brothel— day and night.

I decided to drive in for a first-hand look and was immediately struck by the sheer numbers of merchants lined up on both sides of the roadway hawking their wares. The scene was surreal. The merchants were unusually young. Some were quite striking. All were women and girls from Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Belarus and Bulgaria. Their wares were their bodies, in various degrees of undress. They posed salaciously in skin-tight, midriff-baring jeans, skimpy halters and stiletto heels. As the steady stream of motorists whizzed by, women pulled up their T-shirts and flashed their breasts. Others shouted at the passersby, promising to do whatever they ask.

Despite the macabre, circus-like atmosphere, what is evident even to the untrained observer is that the majority of these women are not in control of their trade. Prowling the territory in beat-up cars are men in sweat suits with gold chains dangling around their necks. Their only function is to keep a watchful eye on their merchandise and collect the money they make.

As I stared in stunned silence at the hapless sea of humanity on E-55, several women gingerly stepped into the street and yelled at passing drivers, “Warte mal!” (Hey, wait!) and “Ich mache alles!” (I do everything!). A slim, blond woman with shoulder-length hair darted over to my car. As I slowed down in the crush of traffic, she pulled open the door and jumped into the passenger side. With a wave of her hand, she directed me to drive over to a secluded, wooded area where she demanded 1400 Czech crowns in advance. I did as she said but told her that I just wanted to talk. She looked dumbfounded, but shrugged her shoulders and nodded.

Throughout the brief, fifteen-minute encounter, her hard brown eyes never left the dashboard. Picking nervously at her raw cuticles, she spoke in a whisper. The conversation was labored. Her name was Lida. She was Romanian, eighteen years old and had been working E-55 for three months. She was an orphan. As she had been preparing to leave an orphanage just outside Bucharest, a woman showed up claiming to be a relative.

“She was my aunt. The director said it was so. I didn’t believe her but what could I do? She told me she had permission to take me. I went with her. She took me to Stephan and he put me to work on this road. I had no say in the matter. My life is no longer my own,” she said in a resigned tone.

Suddenly her eyes filled with panic. “If he sees me talking to you, he will beat me.”

I asked if she wanted to escape. “I can take you away from here.”

Lida’s hands began to shake. “No. He will find me and then he will kill me. He has sworn that to me. Please, I don’t want to talk anymore.”

The conversation ended abruptly when she suddenly dove under the dashboard, making it appear she was working. From the corner of her eye she’d caught a glimpse of Stephan in the passenger-side mirror. The beady-eyed pimp with oily, kinky black hair and a repugnant sneer cruised by in a white, beat-up Ford Opel. He stared menacingly in my direction. A few minutes later Lida left the car and scurried back to her spot on E-55. She looked troubled and sad. Her pimp pulled up, rolled down his window and began yelling at her. Then he stuck his hand out the window and flicked his fingers. She passed him the 1400 crowns and he sped off. With a smile pasted back on her face, Lida stepped into the road, waved at the next passing German license plate and shouted, “Ich mache alles!”

My next stop was the nearby Bohemian hamlet of Dubi. Once famous for its blue-and-white, onion-shaped porcelain known as “cibulak,” it is now infamous for loose women. Dubi is anything but charming. Bars with names like Alibi, Libido and Kiss line the main street alongside a string of fleabag hotels and pensions where no one stays the night. Since the opening of Germany’s borders in 1989 the number of prostitutes working on the Czech side of the border has mushroomed. There are a score of bars and each has a dozen or more young women sitting at tables or dancing to disco music as they wait for the next man to arrive. Over a glass of cheap wine negotiations are quickly finalized, followed by giggles and a little groping before the twosome head off to a room above or at the back of the bar.

“This region is a sex zoo,” a police officer said acidly. “Nobody in government is interested in stopping it. So why should I bother? My job is to make certain there is no trouble, and these whores know better than to make trouble.”

I asked if he thought many of the women were trafficked and forced to work as prostitutes.

The officer laughed. “They have a choice to be prostitutes or to live the good life. They have chosen to be whores.”

A little farther down the roadway in the picturesque hills of the Bohemian Highlands is the spa resort town of Teplice. It harbors a dark secret—the tragic consequences of the sordid romps on E-55 and in Dubi. Every year, dozens of unwanted babies are born and abandoned at the local hospital. They’re the result of clients willing to pay a little more for sex without a condom, and of women who aren’t given any money from their pimps to purchase alternative birth control. On average, three prostitutes give birth each month. Many of the babies are born with syphilis or are HIV-positive. Some are drug addicted. A doctor at the hospital noted that abortions are costly and that many of the women work right up to the day they go into labor. In fact, a steady stream of clients comes specifically to have sex with pregnant women, and they’re willing to pay a premium for the opportunity.

Nearby in a beleaguered orphanage, about seventy E-55 babies are on display, awaiting adoption.